Public use of the internet continues to grow, with over a billion people now accessing the global network. The bandwidth demanded by each of those users also continues to grow substantially—moving from simple e-mails, to graphical web pages, to full streaming video at very high resolutions. In addition, more data is needed to support traditional computing applications over the internet. As a result, many information providers are building large computing facilities, known as data centers, that can provide various services to internet users.
The internet backbone also needs to grow to support the additional demand from all these new users and new services. Such growth is expensive, however, because backbone routers are huge, complex machines, and running of cross-country fibers is costly. In addition, cross-country communication can introduce latency to communications—both because of increased distances, and because of the increased chance of losing and retransmitting packets that are sent through many routers and through long distances.
Thus, it can be beneficial to distribute computing power closer to users. As such, data centers may be moved closer to users, with relevant content sent from a central facility out to regional data centers only once, and further transmissions occurring over shorter regional links. As a result, every request from a user need not result in a transmission cross-country and through the internet backbone—network activity may be more evenly balanced and confined to local areas. Also, transient needs for computing power may arise in a particular area. For example, a military presence may be needed in an area, a natural disaster may bring a need for computing or telecommunication presence in an area until the natural infrastructure can be repaired or rebuilt, and certain events may draw thousands of people who may put a load on the local computing infrastructure.
Deploying a data center or a network or cluster within the data center can be an extensive undertaking. For example, some data centers can include thousands of computing devices, such as servers or switches, which typically are physically connected by optical fiber or copper wire interconnects. In some cases, a data center can include several hundred thousand such individual fiber or copper links, which may be manually connected between devices by a technician or team of technicians. Wiring errors or faulty cables can cause deployment delays that span days or weeks as the misconnected or faulty cables are identified and repositioned or replaced.